Grade School Programming

I knew I was taking a risk with doing a bugs program. I was either going to get kids who are fascinated by bugs or kids who hate bugs. I did not want to traumatize the kids, so I went for cool fascinating facts of why we need bugs. The age group for this program was K5-3rd Grade.

I found some sweet Bug BINGO cards. I gave each kid a BINGO sheet and magnifying glass. We then went outside and searched for bugs in our garden. I knew they were only going to find a few of them. However, the kids had fun running around trying to find bugs.

Pollen Experiment

Pollen Experiment (10 Minutes)

I was a little more hesitant with this experiment. I was not sure if the kids would enjoy it. However, they had a BLAST.

We set-up half of the meeting room with cupcake cups filled with Cheetos. We then taped bees to the kids’ hands. They had to fly around the room and move Cheetos to different cups.

My coworker and I decided to do a joint program called Battle Bots. We thought it would fit well with our summer reading program (On Your Mark Get Set Read) based on the competition aspect. We knew we wanted it for older kids and opted for kids going into Grades 4th-6th.

To keep the budget reasonable, we asked our community for recyclables that were clean and in good shape. We figured the kids could make their own robots out of these materials. I will explain how we battled them below. Our storytime room ended up looking like a hoarder’s den right before this program. We did have fun laying out everything. This photo does no justice of how many recyclables we really had.

We knew the program was going to have to be an hour and a half. We wanted 30 minutes for building, 30 minutes for battling, and 30 minutes for playing with the library’s own robot. So the minute the kids arrived, we sat them down and explained this outline. We then let them loose to start building and creating.

Some of the finished products.

Now it was time to battle. We had the kids make their own dice and gave them a piece of paper. We then teamed up the kids. The kids would roll their dice at the same time. Highest number won. Three rolls and a winner declared. The kids would then tell us who won and we moved on to the next round until we came down to two kids.

Final Battle:

Once the winner was declared, we moved on to playing with the library’s Sphero 2.0. With 23 kids, I knew I would have to time it out. I gave them each 30 seconds to try and maneuver the robot. They got a total kick out of it.

Verdict: 100% doable for the future. The kids had a blast and they depleted about 90% of our recyclables.